In the current information age, it has often been discussed that proliferation of information technology can lead to a paperless society. However, in practice, many people still rely on hardcopy documents for assorted reasons.
For example, there are many instances in which the preparation of a document involves input from multiple individuals simultaneously. In such circumstances, while an electronic working document (for example, generated using application software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Notepad, PhotoEditor, Photoshop, etc.) can be circulated by electronic mail to multiple recipients, the working documents may additionally be distributed in hardcopy form, or a recipient may print the electronic document. In any event, hand-annotation can be applied on the hardcopy, to propose changes thereto and/or to indicate other comments. Such approach (that is, hand-annotating comments on a hardcopy) is still preferred by many. Accordingly, electronic document and corresponding hardcopy continue to co-exist in an office environment in many (and perhaps, most) instances.
In order to update the working document in accordance with the hand-annotated comments, it is typically necessary to identify the version and location of the working document, especially when there are multiple versions of the document. Although some software applications allow the user to specify that a document indicator (such as file name, date and time of creation or last modification, etc.) is to be automatically placed on the document output (for example, hardcopy), such indicators alone may not uniquely identify a location of the document data corresponding to the hardcopy, particularly when multiple versions of the document exist and/or are not in a centralized repository.
In addition, in some instances, a uniform resource locator (URL) is provided to identify a location of such content. However, a URL can consist of a long string of characters and/or symbols, and it can be a burden to a user to reproduce the URL read from the hardcopy, since even a single typographical error when specifying or typing the URL will thwart access to the desired content.
There remains a need for an improved tool that allows a user to readily reference, search for, and/or obtain electronic data corresponding to a hardcopy document.